U-rain-ee-um

I ran out of road. I needed a spot to camp, one that wouldn’t charge cash since I had a grand total of $6.65 in loose change loaded into an old towelette barrel. I turned around, rode an abandoned asphalt highway until it connected back up with I-70. Kept driving west though the treeless Utah sage. This was the most desolate stretch of interstate in the country. ATM’s were about as likely as bears or hookers out here. I thought about camping at Goblin Valley State Park, so I took that exit. On the north side of the interstate across from the two-lane highway to Goblin, I stumbled into a wasteland: an abandoned uranium mining district. Goblin would want money. So, I opted for radioactivity.

Signs warned of radioactive tailings, of radon in the mines and at the sites of mining claims. They told you not to touch a damned thing and to report sightings of mutated B-movie creatures from the 1950’s to the United States Government. I got busy on my phone researching the dangers of camping near old uranium mines. I sifted through pictures of what mining claims actually might look like.

The region was, for obvious reasons, bereft even of extras from Night of the Lepus, a movie about bovine-sized rabbits which have become carnivorous. I stopped at the wood-framed adit to one mine that looked like something out of gold rush days. I drove on, stopping at the entrance to another mine, much larger and more menacing, from the Cold War era. I peered past the cyclone that walled off the adit. The shaft dove down at a 40-degree angle from its square, concrete maw. I expected a hooded ferryman to appear with a staff and a crooked bone in place of a finger, summoning me to follow him down into the chthonic depths.

Chiseled with drifts and shafts, this region was mined for its radioactive elements and pitchblende in the late 18th century, when the curative powers of the newly discovered radium and vanadium were sought, and sometimes downed in liquid form. Again during the Cold War, for much different reasons, yellowcake was heaved up from the depths. Today, retired uranium miners still die long, slow deaths from lung cancer and other diseases acquired as the result of their often-short years of work. Navajo and Anglo alike toiled here and perished for what they considered a patriotic cause.

The land seemed haunted in its loneliness, ominous and stark with its badland domes and giant boulders tumbled down from the barren buttes like the headstones of long dead titans. Lifeless mudstone mesas stood in butter and rose and bullion bands. In steel walls, rain clouds rolled in above the San Rafael Reef just west, which meandered in stegosaur-like plates. The region seemed ancient and alien, with an admixture of more recent, Cold War relict mines from whose mouths wailed the dirges of uncounted ghosts. I’ve written a book, The Mind Altar, The Mind Altar – Kindle edition by Just, Michael. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com which is set in blind depths far removed from sky and civilization. These interred mines reminded me of the setting.

I camped across from a stark butte, littered with boulders and old balance rocks that had fallen to its base and lie there like dolmen stones.  I hiked west to the Reef, wary of all the yellow, caked rock that may have been the ore of the toxic metal with the periodic symbol U, for Uneasy. Darker clouds barreled in across the Reef like the undersides of oceanic breakers.

As the storm heaved and brewed, I looped back to camp. I tarried a little, then decided to climb the butte which loomed across Four Corners Mine Road from my camp. The stark minerals, olive and rust, grape and tarnished gold, stained the banded mud towers. Conglomerate rock came apart in my hands. Chocolate stones like Nestle’s Crunch bars lay in giant, broken shards, as if recent rockhounds had broken them open in search of geods.  But no one treaded here. The radioactive signs had warned them all off.

As I helixed up and around the butte, my camper across the way became a toy thing, an old Matchbox car from my boyhood. Above me, a hard, stone boulder was cemented to a thin, sandy pedicel, probably made of shale, just a few inches in diameter.  How did the precarious boulder not collapse? I could’ve easily pushed it down the steep side of the butte. Or, so that little, ruining boy inside me believed.

So much of the rock here was loosely glued together. Most of it was sandstone or mudstone or maybe siltstone. How had it lasted so long against rain and wind without crumbling back to dune?

As I scrambled back down the butte, the haunting, lonely spirit of the land evaporated into the sunbreaks, replaced by light, which induced peace within. In Backpacking with the Saints, a book on solitude and desert spirituality I’d brought with me for this trip, Belden Lane had written about the seemingly threatening desert suddenly peeling back its forbidding outer course to reveal an unexpected welcome. I felt that belonging just before sundown.

I climbed back down into gravel beds and outwash plains, trekking a wash instead of the road. The flat beds of dissolved hillside roved with sage that smelled sweet just after the cleansing rain. In a moment, this place had eroded from badland into Eden. I couldn’t wait to tell my fellow solitary camper, Clint, about this unsung wadi.

I used to say, when I was on the edge of a cliff or halfway up a mountain, that I didn’t have bragging rights unless I made it back home, in one piece. I decided not to tell Clint. Resolution # 5: No Competing.

To get to the uranium mines: Take Interstate 70 about 12 miles west of the town of Green River. Exit Highway 24 for Goblin Valley. Instead of crossing the interstate south to Goblin, take the dirt road, Four Corner Mine Road, north.

The Mind Altar – Kindle edition by Just, Michael. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.